Yes, these are legal between consenting adults in the state of Virginia.

Seriously, keeping up with social media can absorb your entire life if you let it. So you need to control it rather than letting it control you. A good way to do this is keeping your media in as few places as possible (aggregation) and having things sent to you instead of you having to go get them (push).

Let’s start with aggregation. Remember my recent post on Google Reader? Reader collects all the blogs you are reading and allows you to go to one place to read them, saving you from having to go from website to website to keep up. That saves a lot of time. And Google Reader highlights blogs with current entries, so you don’t have to worry about who has updated yet and who hasn’t. That’s almost, but not quite, push.

Now let’s look at a program that aggregates AND pushes. Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck allows you to keep track of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace all through one program. It keeps each account in a separate column. When someone tweets, it shows up. And when someone updates their status or posts a link on Facebook, that shows up as well. That’s the aggregation, and the program would be great if that’s all it did. But, as long as you have the program running on your computer, you will get pop-up notifications when a new post arrives. You can even group your contacts, so when one of your best friend posts something, you’ll get a different pop-up notification than when Great Aunt Martha posts a picture on her Facebook page of you when you were three years old.

This was very useful to me a couple of nights ago. I’m subscribed to Swagbucks, where I can get free stuff. Swagbucks posts codes to various places, including Twitter. Enter the code, and you get a Swagbuck. Wednesday night, they tweeted that later in the evening, they were going to be posting a code that was good for only 10 minutes. I got it because Tweetdeck “pushed” that post to me. Without Tweetdeck, I probably would have missed it.

And that’s how I keep up. I have most of my social media content aggregated in Google Reader and Tweetdeck. And Tweetdeck pushes stuff to me so I know exactly when something pops up.

Anyone else have any good ways to keep track?

Gotta go. Tweetdeck just told me a friend updated their Facebook page. I need to see what’s up.

Tags: blogging, networking on the go, social media, time management

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 9:08 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.